Neuroscience has Underserved Women. That’s Changing
Neuroscientists are making strides in mapping and understanding the human brain, but like many other scientific fields, neuroscientific research has suffered from gender bias: men have been studied far more than women.
Since it came on the scene, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), where a magnetic camera looks through the skull and captures pictures of a living brain, mountains of neuroimaging studies have been made by scientists eagerly delving into the most complex organ we have. It’s led to amazing discoveries and insights, and revolutionised our understanding of how we function.
But the neuroscientific investigation into brain health in relation to conditions only affecting women, girls, and people who have or have had menstrual periods, has been comparably pitifully small.
My name’s Livia. I’m a freelance science writer and journalism student, and I found myself diving into this as I wondered why hormonal birth control, several decades after its invention, still causes negative effects on many users’ moods and well-being. Shouldn’t somebody have looked into how our brains get affected when we go on the pill — and created something better?
It turns out that this large neuroscience knowledge gap leaves billions of people in the dark about the organ that creates their lived experiences, affects drug development, and is bad for science, generally.
It’s time for neuroscience to catch up.
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